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Dec. 13, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show

47:53

The Tide Rolls Over Roy Moore | Ep. 436

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	Alright, well we have the full Alabama Senate race breakdown.
	Roy Moore loses in a shocking upset.
	Ruby Red Alabama turns blue for Doug Jones.
	We'll explain just why and whom ought to be blamed.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Another shocking, shocking election result, this time out of Alabama, where Roy Moore, the frontrunner, the Republican in a state that went 97% for Jeff Sessions in the last Senate election, has now gone blue.
	Doug Jones is your new senator from Alabama.
	He is a hardcore Democrat who will caucus with Chuck Schumer.
	He's a pro-abortion Democrat.
	And that is not because Doug Jones is a good candidate that he won.
	There are a lot of lessons to be learned from what happened last night in Alabama.
	Republicans are going to need to learn them or they're going to get their asses handed to them in 2018.
	It really will be that simple.
	But before I get to any of that, first...
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	Okay, so I want to give you the full drama of yesterday because it was a dramatic day in politics.
	It began with a bunch of botchery on the part of the Roy Moore campaign.
	So first, Roy Moore arrives to vote, and he decides that it is necessary to underscore that he is a true Alabaman.
	How do we know this?
	Because he arrived on horseback to vote.
	I mean, not like he wants to be stereotypical or anything.
	He shows up on horseback to vote.
	Even Laura Ingraham, who's been backing Moore in this race so far as I can tell, even Laura Ingraham said this was not exactly the smartest political move.
	The funniest thing I saw was this video of Roy Moore arriving to vote on horseback and somebody cut under it the music to Blazing Saddles.
	So it does work, I will say that.
	He rode a blazing saddle.
	He wore a shining star.
	His job to offer battle to bad men near and far.
	He conquered fear and he conquered hate.
	He turned dark night into bright day.
	He made his blazing saddle a torch to light the way.
	Okay, so there was Roy Moore arriving for the vote.
	Okay, and then it got worse for Roy Moore.
	Here's the first lesson to be learned from what happened in Alabama last night, where Roy Moore narrowly, narrowly lost to Doug Jones.
	I mean, like lost by 20,000 votes out of 100, out of 1.2 million votes cast, something like that.
	The first lesson to be learned is there is a line for voters.
	There's a point where voters just will not show up for you.
	Now, the line for what you'll vote for gets raised by the impact of the election.
	So, let's put it this way.
	If this has been a dog catcher election, no one shows up to vote for Roy Moore.
	It's a Senate election, so 600,000 people show up to vote for Roy Moore.
	If it's a presidential election, then you can be Donald Trump and you can win, because the stakes are so high at that point that people are going to show up regardless, because they feel like they must show up out of necessity.
	But, For a Senate election, even for a presidential election, there's a line beyond which Americans are not willing to go.
	Roy Moore crossed that line.
	It really is that simple.
	He was an unpalatable candidate from the beginning, before there were any of these allegations about the sexual molestation of underage women, before there were any of those allegations that had even broken.
	It was known that Roy Moore was not a popular candidate in the state of Alabama.
	He'd already lost, I believe, a Senate primary to somebody.
	He'd been tossed out of the Supreme Court twice.
	He had been running a narrow race with Doug Jones before all of those revelations broke.
	And every two days, he would say something utterly insipid, or there would be a clip of him coming out from four or five years ago in which he said something utterly insipid.
	Yesterday, his spokespeople did not do him any favors.
	In their final pitch, they were making comments like this.
	Here is one of Roy Moore's spokespeople, asked whether he thinks homosexuality should be illegal.
	Does he think that homosexual conduct should be illegal?
	It's a yes or no question.
	Probably.
	He probably thinks homosexual conduct should be illegal.
	And what would the punishment be for a man having sexual relations with another man or a woman having sexual relations with another woman?
	What should the punishment be?
	It's just a sin, okay?
	Okay, so again, I agree, by the way, as a biblical Jew, I believe that homosexual conduct is a sin.
	I also believe breaking Sabbath is a sin.
	I don't think the government should be involved in enforcing either of those things.
	That was not the moment that everybody was going nuts about yesterday in the lead up to this election.
	Here was Roy Moore's spokesperson who was talking about Roy Moore's position that Muslims should not sit in Congress or be able to hold elected office.
	This was a stunning piece of video.
	I mean, just, like, if this was the best that Alabama had to offer on the Republican side, it's no wonder that Roy Moore is not sitting in the Senate.
	Judge Moore has also said that he doesn't think a Muslim member of Congress should be allowed to be in Congress.
	Why?
	Under what provision of the Constitution?
	Because you have to swear on the Bible.
	When you are before... I had to do it.
	I'm an elected official.
	Three terms.
	I had to swear on the Bible.
	You have to swear on a Bible to be an elected official in the United States of America.
	He alleges that a Muslim cannot do that ethically, swearing on the Bible.
	You don't actually have to swear on a Christian Bible.
	You can swear on anything, really.
	I don't know if you knew that.
	You can swear on a Jewish Bible.
	Oh, no.
	I swear on the Bible.
	I've done it three times.
	I'm sure you have.
	I'm sure you've picked a Bible, but the law is not that you have to swear on a Christian Bible.
	That is not the law.
	Yeah, not a good look for your closing argument.
	I don't know why you'd have Slim Pickens as your actual campaign spokesperson.
	when we made him president.
	Because he's Christian and he picked it.
	That's what he wanted to swear in on.
	Ted Crockett with the Moore campaign.
	Good luck tonight.
	Thank you so much for being here.
	Yeah, not a good luck for your closing argument.
	I don't know why you'd have slim pickings as your actual campaign spokesperson.
	It just seems like a mistake to me.
	But the first lesson is you can't just run anyone and hope to win, okay?
	Roy Moore was a crappy candidate.
	The reason Roy Moore lost last night was not because of write-in votes.
	It's because no one showed up to vote for him.
	The turnout on behalf of Doug Jones in Alabama, Doug Jones won 94% of all the votes that Hillary Clinton won in a presidential election.
	Doug Jones won last night in Alabama.
	49% of the votes Donald Trump won in Alabama went to Roy Moore, meaning that a lot of Republicans stayed home because they just didn't like Roy Moore, they didn't like what he represented, they didn't like all the allegations about him, and they were not wrong to do so, okay?
	You present crappy candidates and they're gonna lose.
	It turns out that the quality of your candidates still matters, and railing against the wind, suggesting that It's the fault of people who stayed home, rather than the fault of the candidate, or the people who supported that candidate, is just ridiculous.
	And it's tiring to me, this backstabbing legend that you're getting, the dochstochlegen, the nonsense that you get from Steve Bannon and company, that, oh, it was just that Roy Moore was stabbed in the back and that's why he lost.
	Maybe Roy Moore lost because there were credible allegations that he was molesting underage women and trying to date people at the food court.
	Maybe he lost because he was really bad at this.
	Maybe he lost because he couldn't win an election to save his life on a statewide level before this, basically.
	The idea that this was all because there were a bunch of people who were just out to get Roy Moore is insane.
	You think I wanted to lose a seat in Alabama?
	You think anyone who's a Republican in Alabama wanted to lose that seat to Doug Jones?
	Are you kidding me?
	It's not about that.
	It's about you gotta present a candidate that earns people's votes.
	Roy Moore didn't earn people's votes.
	The laws of political gravity still apply.
	That's lesson number one.
	Lesson number two.
	Don't follow Steve Bannon down the primrose path like Steve Bannon knows what the hell he's talking about.
	I've never seen someone botch an election as badly as Steve Bannon over at Breitbart News just botched this sucker.
	And not just botched this, he's basically waving a frying pan around and all of us were saying, dude, don't wave that frying pan around, you're gonna smack Trump in the face.
	Then he smacked Trump in the face with a frying pan and then he goes, well if you were just more pro-Trump, this never would have happened.
	I was like, well, maybe you shouldn't wave a frying pan around in the form of Roy Moore, you dunderhead.
	Roy Moore was being very heavily pushed by Bannon in the last days.
	Bannon was going to Alabama and saying things like, Mitt Romney's family has less honor in all of its DNA than Roy Moore has in his little finger.
	He was going to Alabama and suggesting that elitists from the outside, Steve Bannon's from New York and Goldman Sachs and Harvard Business School in LA, and he's showing up in Alabama wearing his homeless man coat, suggesting that he was the great avatar of the people, who's going to speak now on behalf of the Republicans against the establishment.
	And Roy Moore was on Steve Bannon yesterday, his show on Breitbart News that no one listens to.
	He'll have more listenership to his Breitbart News.
	Radio show being played on mine than he will actually having his own show.
	Here is Roy Moore on Bannon's show yesterday.
	Before I let you go, what was this campaign about?
	Well, this campaign was about truth, about right, about what this nation was founded upon, what we must return to to have the nation again be whole.
	And I think it's it's we've got to get away from this politics by party and go put principle over party.
	Yeah, if there's somebody who puts principle above everything, I'm sure that it's Roy Moore, and I'm sure that if someone puts principle above everything, it's certainly Steve Bannon, who's the greatest charlatan, political charlatan and conman and leech I've ever seen in my life.
	The media have turned Steve Bannon into some sort of great avatar of the people, some face of Trumpism without Trump.
	It doesn't exist.
	President Trump, take Steve Bannon off your cell phone.
	It's a waste of your time to call Steve Bannon.
	The man does not have a channel to the people.
	He's not representative of your base.
	Your base did not show up to vote for Roy Moore.
	Roy Moore didn't earn half of what you earned in Alabama.
	You, Mr. President.
	The idea that you're calling Steve Bannon for advice on how to act about Alabama, it's ridiculous.
	You have better instincts than Steve Bannon did.
	You picked Luther Strange in the primary, who would have won this election by 80,000 points.
	In the second primary runoff, you backed Luther Strange as well there.
	Luther Strange would have won this race walking away.
	In the general election, once these allegations came out, your first move was to basically go hands-off.
	That was the right move.
	Steve Bannon somehow must have convinced you to jump back in with both feet and then get the RNC to jump back in, meaning that you smear yourself with mud.
	You get it all over yourself and all over the RNC, and then you lose the Senate seat anyway.
	And this has real ramifications.
	Stop pretending that Steve Bannon knows what the hell he's talking about.
	Steve Bannon leeched onto Sarah Palin, then he leeched onto Andrew Breitbart until Andrew died, then he took over Andrew Breitbart's power position at Breitbart, used that to leech onto Donald Trump, and has now ridden that to this perception of power that he does not hold, all the while writing checks with his mouth that are paid for by the Mercer family.
	Steve Bannon does not have the ear of the American people.
	He does not have the ear of the base.
	And Trump needs to get away from this.
	Take him off your cell phone.
	All Bannon's out there for is Steve Bannon.
	He does not care about the Trump agenda.
	If Steve Bannon cared as much about the Trump agenda as I care about the Trump agenda, then he wouldn't have been backing Roy Moore.
	He would have been urging Roy Moore to get out of the race as soon as these allegations hit.
	He would have been urging Trump to urge Roy Moore to get out of the race when these allegations hit.
	He would have been urging Trump to tell Jeff Sessions to go back to Alabama and run for office there.
	He had been moving to get Roy Moore out of a race where Roy Moore was going to lose to a Democrat.
	Instead, Steve Bannon wanted to glorify himself at the expense of the quote-unquote establishment.
	An establishment, by the way, in the form of Mitch McConnell, who has been moving along with Trump's policy agenda this entire time.
	I don't like Mitch McConnell either.
	I think Mitch McConnell is a squish in many ways.
	But I'll tell you what, it's not Mitch McConnell's fault that Trump's agenda isn't passing through Congress.
	Mitch McConnell is trying to pass Trump's agenda through Congress.
	He's doing a lot more for Trump's agenda than Steve freaking Bannon has.
	Leave Steve Bannon at the door.
	This idea that Steve Bannon is leading a new Trumpist movement is nonsense.
	He never was the leader of a movement.
	The Tea Party pre-existed Bannon and pre-existed Trump.
	Trump pre-existed Bannon, and Trump will outlive Bannon as well.
	This should be the death knell of the idea that Steve Bannon is some sort of political genius, because he clearly is not.
	I mean, every move that it is possible to make wrong, he made wrong here.
	At first, he endorsed Mo Brooks in the primary.
	That was all right.
	You know, I was okay with that.
	I also thought Mo Brooks was the proper guy in the primaries.
	But then he said back Roy Moore over Luther Strange in the runoff.
	And then, after Roy Moore was hit with allegations, he encouraged Moore to stay in the race.
	And then he convinced the president to put his own credibility on the line on behalf of a guy who was running a neck-and-neck race in 66% Republican Alabama.
	Just what a genius he is.
	What a genius.
	And by the way, helping to drive up Democratic numbers up the wazoo.
	I mean, the numbers last night are really scary for Republicans, and I'm going to discuss that in just a second, what the fallout means for all of this and a couple of other lessons.
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	So, a few other lessons that I want to give you about Alabama.
	First of all, Democrats today are celebrating.
	They're over the moon.
	They think now, they have sort of the reverse position that Republicans had before this election.
	Republicans thought, before Roy Moore, that they could literally run anyone and it would work out just fine.
	Right?
	Democrats now think that.
	They think they can run a pro-abortion advocate in Alabama and win.
	If they think this, they are stupid.
	Let's put it this way.
	A credibly accused child molester almost became senator in Alabama.
	If the Democrats had any brains at all, they'd be running pro-lifers in places like Alabama.
	You know if Doug Jones had been pro-life, that he would have won this election by 10 points?
	But the Democrats are so foolish that they're becoming more and more homogenous in their viewpoint.
	And when they do that, they prevent the capacity for their candidates to win in purple and red states.
	They're hoping that turnout wins all, but I'm not sure that's going to be the case.
	So that's a lesson for Democrats out of all of this.
	It is worth noting, by the way, that Democrats are going to be extraordinarily hungry in 2018.
	The statistics from Virginia, Alabama, these are grim for Republicans heading into 2018.
	I'm looking right now And how special elections have shifted so far this year.
	Okay, the California 34th District has moved 18 points in favor of Democrats.
	Kansas 4, 23 points in favor of Democrats.
	Montana, a special election, 15 points in favor of Democrats.
	Georgia, 6th District, 6 points in favor of Democrats.
	South Carolina, 5th District, 16 points in favor of Democrats.
	And then the Alabama Senate race, of course, moved 31 points in favor of Democrats.
	On average, the special elections are moving 16 points in favor of Democrats.
	The generic congressional ballot for 2018 currently has Democrats up 10 points.
	10 points.
	And it's going to get worse from there if Republicans don't stanch the bleeding.
	The idea that Republicans can just rally behind Trump and that's going to be enough?
	I don't see the evidence for that.
	Here's the reality about President Trump.
	It makes a difference whether you are pro-Trump or not in a primary election.
	You can't win a primary in the Republican Party unless you are, at the very least, not openly anti-Trump.
	Jeff Flake is learning that the hard way.
	But when it gets to a general election, allegiance to Trump doesn't carry a whole lot of weight.
	Roy Moore tried to tie himself to Trump's hip.
	It didn't help him one iota.
	Ed Gillespie in Virginia tried to tie himself to Trump.
	Did not help.
	One iota.
	Trump does not have coattails.
	Now, that's not about Trump, okay?
	That's not unique to Trump.
	Trump is not a popular president, but that's not unique to Trump.
	Obama didn't have coattails, and he was a popular president.
	While Obama was riding in the 50s, his party was losing 1,000 seats across the country.
	Trump is riding in the 30s with a good economy and a soaring stock market, and he's made very good political moves over the last couple of weeks in terms of policy.
	I don't really see how tying yourself to Trump is necessarily a winning strategy if you're a Republican in a general election.
	I just don't see that it's going to matter a whole hell of a lot.
	So Republicans should take that to heart, and Trump should understand that this is not about ego at this point.
	If he wants to retain Congress, if he wants to retain the Senate, he's going to have to actually work hard to ensure That other Republicans win, whether they endorse him or not.
	Republicans now are on the verge of losing the Senate.
	It's hard to lose the Senate.
	But losing Alabama is a good way to start.
	They now have 51 votes in the Senate.
	That means that if they lose Dean Heller in Nevada, which is a significant possibility, all they have to do is lose one more seat and they lose control of the Senate.
	And you don't know where that seat's going to occur.
	You don't know where a candidate's going to blow up.
	Democrats have 10 seats that are up in red states this year.
	It's going to be interesting to see if they're able to hold any of those, or if they hold all of them.
	But the momentum is clearly with the Democrats going into 2018, and Republicans should know that.
	Republicans should know that.
	So, in just a second, I want to talk a little bit about more of the fallout here.
	President Trump tweeted his congratulations.
	This clearly was sort of a ghostwritten tweet on behalf of President Trump, you can tell by the punctuation.
	It says, congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard-fought victory.
	The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win.
	The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at the seat in a very short period of time.
	It never ends.
	That's very true.
	Doug Jones is not going to be Senator in Alabama longer than four years.
	He will be gone.
	As well, he should be.
	He's a Democrat.
	It's Alabama.
	He shouldn't be the Senator from Alabama.
	The only reason he is is because of this fluke where Roy Moore, one of the worst candidates in the history of modern politics, was running for a Senate seat in a deep red state.
	That was not the only thing that Trump tweeted.
	He came out this morning, he tweeted again, and he suggested that it was all about the write-in votes.
	It was really not all about the write-in votes.
	It was about Republicans.
	Staying home.
	Roy Moore, by the way, says that he's not going to concede yet.
	So he's just going to stick around bothering people.
	But this race is over.
	Nobody is going to stick around for the recount.
	He's toast.
	Here's Roy Moore saying that he's not going to make a concession.
	I really want to thank you for coming tonight and realize when the vote is this close that it's not over.
	And we still got to go by the rules about this recount provision.
	And that's what we've got to do is wait on God.
	And let this process play out.
	I know it's late.
	We can't wait and have everybody wait until after 11 o'clock.
	But the votes are still coming in, and we're looking at that.
	May God bless you as you go on.
	May He give you a safe journey.
	And thank you for coming tonight.
	It's not over, and it's going to take some time.
	Thank you.
	Okay, so that means nothing.
	He's toast.
	We're not going to see any more of Roy Moore.
	He is done in national politics, as well he should be.
	One of the other takeaways in terms of the blowout among Democrats, I mean Democrats really showed up to vote in major numbers here, is that the black vote in Alabama was extraordinarily high.
	So one of the reasons that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 is because black folks did not show up to vote for Hillary Clinton.
	If they'd showed up to vote for Hillary at the same rates they voted for Obama, she would have won in a walk.
	They did not.
	They did show up in Alabama last night.
	30% of the electorate in Alabama last night was black.
	That is an extraordinarily high percentage.
	A lot of that is driven by the politics of race.
	It's driven by the alienation a lot of black voters feel with the current Republican Party.
	Young people, if you look at the votes in Alabama among young people, they won heavily for Doug Jones.
	This is a serious problem for Republicans.
	They're going to have to win over new people.
	This was one of the questions in 2016.
	In 2016, can you get enough of the base out to defeat Hillary Clinton?
	And the answer was, yes, but barely, and you lost the popular vote.
	If you are going to win in 2020, you're going to have to pick up somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million additional votes just to be competitive in the next presidential election.
	In 2018, you're going to have to pick up new audiences.
	You're going to pick up young people?
	The polls aren't showing it.
	You're going to pick up black people?
	The polls aren't showing it.
	We were told that President Trump was going to pick up a lot of these crowds.
	He hasn't spent a lot of time cultivating those crowds.
	It's time for Republicans to get on their horse.
	They can't sit on their laurels.
	They can't assume every election is going to be won just because President Trump pulled a rabbit out of the hat and somehow defeated Hillary Clinton.
	That's an accomplishment.
	It's not a strategy.
	There is a difference.
	A President Trump beating Hillary Clinton was a massive accomplishment.
	All credit to President Trump.
	But it is not a strategy.
	Hillary was wildly unpopular.
	Presidential elections are not midterm or congressional elections.
	All of this makes a difference.
	Now, what you're going to see today is a bunch of people trying to spin away from blaming Steve Bannon, trying to spin away from blaming the people in the primaries who voted for Roy Moore.
	No, which would be a mistake.
	Sean Hannity is trying to blame Mitch McConnell, of course.
	This is going to be the convenient answer.
	This is also Bannon's play to try and blame Mitch McConnell, as though if McConnell had come out more strongly in favor of Moore, Moore would have won, as opposed to Moore as a crappy candidate.
	Here's the reality.
	I don't want to get on Sean's case here, but I've been on Sean's case about this for a few weeks, or at least I mentioned it a few weeks ago.
	Sean said that if Roy Moore did not show him that he was innocent, or any evidence that he was innocent, that he would tell Roy Moore to step out of the race within 24 hours.
	Roy Moore provided no such evidence, and Sean instead backed off of that and did not pressure Moore to step out of the race at all.
	Moore stayed in.
	Moore lost.
	Sean blames Mitch McConnell.
	I don't think this is correct.
	But meanwhile, what this last election was about in 2016 is the forgotten men and forgotten women that need jobs, that are on food stamps, in poverty, and they want a shot at the American dream also.
	So if that is the Republican strategy, I mean, it almost takes my breath away.
	And it also goes, I think Mitch McConnell has a lot of culpability in all of this.
	I was a Mo Brooks supporter from day one.
	I've known Mo Brooks nearly 30 years.
	He used to fill in in my radio show when I had a show in Huntsville, Alabama.
	And I thought he would have been a great candidate.
	The person that came out strongest against Mo Brooks, Matt, Okay, so Mitch McConnell, let me be clear.
	Mitch McConnell does bear some responsibility for supporting Luther Strange in the primary and killing Mo Brooks in order because he thought that in the runoff, Luther Strange would do better against Roy Moore.
	Obviously a bad miscalculation on the part of Mitch McConnell.
	He doesn't have clean hands here.
	But the idea that Mitch McConnell bears the clearest culpability here is just not true.
	It's just not true.
	Republicans are going to have to understand that just because we want something to be true does not make it true.
	Just because we want it to be true, that Trumpism is a strategy and not just an accomplishment, it doesn't mean that it's true.
	And just because we want it to be true that we are going to be able to pull a rabbit out of every hat, that's not true either.
	There's going to have to be an actual change in how we look at things.
	New voters are going to have to be brought into the fold.
	I think President Trump is capable of that if he can keep himself under control, if he stops calling Steve Bannon, if the Republicans actually pass some legislation, for God's sake.
	If any of that happens, then I think that the blowout can be averted.
	I still think Republicans will lose seats in 2018, but it doesn't have to be a blowout.
	I'll talk a little bit about the stats in just a second.
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	And as I say, right now, if you go to stamps.com and click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in Shapiro, you will get a four-week trial plus postage and a digital scale with no long-term commitment.
	Again, stamps.com, promo code Shapiro.
	It's a perfect time to try this out, because you're gonna be mailing stuff.
	I know you are, right?
	I mean, we're running up to the deadline.
	Hanukkah started last night, and we are running up to the deadline on Christmas.
	So, if you're sending presents, now is the time for you to try out stamps.com, and use that promo code Shapiro.
	Let's them know that we sent you as well.
	So, here are a little bit of the stats about 2018.
	People are trying to use the single data point of Alabama in order to demonstrate what exactly What exactly Republicans should expect in 2018.
	I think that's a little bit of an overreach, but...
	This is an off-year election.
	In off-year elections since World War II, the party in power loses, on average, 25 seats.
	Republicans currently have a 23-seat majority.
	In 2006, 2010, 2014, the last three midterm elections, the swings have been incredibly large.
	At this moment, the generic ballot shows Democrats with a 10.3% lead in the RealClearPolitics average.
	At this time in 2009, Republicans led the generic ballot by 3% to 4%, and they ended up blowing that out to a 7% advantage in the 2010 elections, and they ended up picking up 60 seats.
	In the 2006 cycle, Now there are a couple factors that are militating against Democrats having a blowout year.
	One is, as I say, the bad cycle for Senate elections.
	The chances that the Democrats win the Senate, even in this environment, are relatively low.
	I would say probably 20 to 30 percent.
	I would have said before about 2 percent.
	Now I think it's about 20 to 30 percent.
	If you look at, but I'm ballparking it, if you look at the House elections, There are 23 seats right now that are Republican seats in Clinton districts.
	The chances are that a lot of those swing away from the Republicans, but Democrats also have 12 seats in Republican districts, so it's very possible that those swing away from Democrats.
	It's not clear-cut that Democrats have as easy a road to winning the House as Republicans did in 2010 or as they had an increase in 2014.
	The reason being a lot of these districts have gotten both redder and bluer, meaning that the districts are more polarized.
	But Republicans are going to need to make some moves here.
	That means passing this tax reform plan now.
	That is on Mitch McConnell.
	You want to blame McConnell for something?
	That one's on Mitch McConnell.
	Pass some legislation.
	It's on President Trump to go out and stump for that tax reform package.
	It's time for President Trump to deliver on his guarantee with regard to the wall.
	It's time for Republicans to stand tall in the face of Democratic threats to shut down the government.
	Let the Democrats...
	Shut down funding for seniors because they want to make sure that there's no border security.
	Let's have that political battle.
	These are all political battles that can be fought and won.
	But they cannot be fought and won if there's a distraction every time.
	Now, President Trump can get away with being a distracting guy.
	He can get away with tweeting stuff about the NFL.
	But when it comes to other elections, people don't take crap the way they do in a presidential.
	In a presidential, the stakes are so high that people's threshold for taking crap from their own side is incredibly high, too.
	The same does not hold true of Senate elections or congressional elections.
	We need to recognize this reality if Republicans hope to retain any semblance of control in Washington, D.C.
	So, Alabama should be a wake-up call to a lot of people.
	By the way, it should also be a wake-up call for Democrats that they need a particular set of voters, particularly Obama voters, if they want to win.
	Charles Barkley made this point.
	Barkley was stumping for Doug Jones in Alabama.
	He's from Alabama.
	He's a Republican.
	But he was stumping against Roy Moore.
	Here is Charles Barkley talking about the terrible night for Roy Moore.
	What's your message for President Trump tonight?
	As an Alabamian, as somebody who helped deliver the state to Doug Jones, what do you want President Trump to take away from this evening?
	Well, this is a wake-up call for Democrats.
	You're Democrats, and I told Mr. Jones this, and I love Doug, they've taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time.
	It's time for them to get off their ass and start making life better for black folks and people who are poor.
	They've always had our votes, and they have abused our votes, and this is a wake-up call.
	We got it in a great position now.
	But this is a wake-up call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.
	Okay, so Charles Barkley letting the Democrats know that black votes are not always on the table for Democrats just because they want them to be.
	So there are some realities that are setting in for both sides.
	If the sides are willing to look at them, I doubt that either side will.
	I think Democrats are going to continue to run radicals in races where they should be running moderates.
	And I think that Republicans are going to continue to run bad candidates just because anti-establishment and all the rest of this, because if people actually learned their lessons, maybe our politics would get better.
	But I highly doubt that that's actually going to happen.
	OK, in other news, there's a massive piece of breaking news that I don't know how Robert Mueller spins this away with regard to his investigation.
	I mean, this is truly an incredible piece of news.
	So there's a series of text messages that were exchanged between top FBI employees referring to presidential candidate Donald Trump as an idiot and a douche, while fearing his potential victory is terrifying.
	This was from Peter Strzok, the guy who was removed in, I believe it was August of this year, from the Russian counterintelligence investigation by the FBI because of his bias.
	He was also involved in initiating the Russian counterintelligence investigation.
	And him calling Trump an idiot or a douche, I don't think any of that makes a difference as far as whether he can do his job or not.
	I think a lot of people have called the president those names, including his own Secretary of State.
	But I don't think that one of these messages is capable of explanation.
	And I think that it's going to be very difficult to explain away why Straszak was involved in this In this investigation, to begin with, why he was allowed to initiate this investigation, to begin with, if this stuff was true.
	So on March 16th, 2016, he texted his paramour, Linda Page, and she texted him, I cannot believe Donald Trump is likely to be an actual serious candidate for president.
	And he wrote back, God, Trump is a loathsome human, yet he may win.
	And then, this is the big one, August 15th, 2016, Straszak tells his girlfriend, Page, quote, I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy's office, that'd be Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who has significant connections to Democrats, that there's no way he gets elected, but I'm afraid we can't take that risk.
	It's like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you're 40.
	What that sounds very much like is that Strzok and his girlfriend, his mistress, that basically they were initiating investigations into Trump as an insurance policy in case Trump would win.
	That is shocking stuff.
	Okay, that's much more of a smoking gun than anything I've seen in the Trump investigation to target President Trump.
	According to CNN, as the former number two official in counterintelligence, Strzok helped lead the FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's private email server and was involved in opening the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S.
	presidential election.
	Page was also briefly on Mueller's team before returning to the FBI, but she completed her detail before the special counsel's office was made aware of the texts.
	So, in other words, two of the people who were involved in key ways in both the Hillary investigation and the Trump investigation were not only biased against Trump, they were openly talking about setting up an insurance policy with the FBI deputy director in case Trump were to be elected.
	I mean, that is shocking, shocking stuff.
	That's the sort of stuff that kills an investigation.
	Yesterday, I was sort of mocking the idea of a special investigation of the special investigation, not mocking it anymore.
	OK, based on that text, it seems to me that there should be some sort of real investigation that goes on into exactly how the special investigation is conducting its business.
	All of this could be setting up Trump to fire the members of Mueller's team or to fire Mueller himself.
	On the basis of this, I can't say that would be completely illegitimate.
	I think it would be a bad political move.
	I think it would be unwise for the president to do that, but it would not be completely illegitimate.
	This does not look like a team that was designed to get to the bottom of things.
	It looks like a team that was designed to dig and dig and dig until they find something that they can use politically against the president of the United States, or at least that's what some people on the team were looking for.
	Now, Mueller got rid of Strzok when he found out about these texts, but the damage is already done.
	In evidence, there's something called, in legal evidence, there's something called Fruit of the Poisonous Tree doctrine.
	The idea is that if I don't have a warrant to search inside your house, and I just break into your house, I'm a cop, I break into your house and I find a murder weapon, that murder weapon is not admissible in court because it's quote-unquote Fruit of the Poisonous Tree.
	I broke the law in order to go into your house, and now I can't admit that evidence in court, even though it would help convict you.
	This is very similar.
	Even if this investigation were to come up with something, it's difficult to tell whether we came up with it through bias or whether it was come up with through actual investigation.
	And right now, I haven't seen any evidence at all that's been presented that Trump was involved in Russia collusion.
	Apparently, the period that's being focused on now in the investigation is the period after Trump was elected.
	Which doesn't sound like election collusion with the Russians to me.
	This investigation is spiraling out of control.
	I think President Trump knows it, and it's frustrating him, and I think rightly so.
	Also, the media's continual focus on President Trump and trying to nitpick him, it is galling.
	90% of all of the coverage on TV of President Trump has been negative so far.
	That probably contrasts with 90% that was positive so far in Obama's presidency.
	And as evidence of just how bad the media are, I need to talk a little bit about this blow-up that happened with Kirsten Gillibrand yesterday.
	I mentioned it yesterday that President Trump knocked Kirsten Gillibrand, the senator from New York, after Gillibrand suggested that President Trump should step down from his position because of sexual harassment or abuse allegations.
	And Trump tweeted back at her, and he said something like, you know, she would come into your office on her knees to beg for things, right?
	This is a woman who'd do anything to beg.
	And the Democrats said, "Oh, this is crazy.
	Trump is making a sexual reference to Kirsten Gillibrand." Trump has said exactly the same thing about Mitt Romney, like word for word about Mitt Romney.
	But that didn't stop the Democrats in the media from running with this false narrative.
	There's Kirsten Gillibrand playing the wounded innocent in all of this.
	Were you offended by the apparent insinuations in the president's tweets this morning?
	It was a sexist smear attempting to silence my voice.
	And I will not be silenced on this issue.
	Neither will the women who stood up to the President yesterday, and neither will the millions of women who have been marching since the Women's March to stand up against policies they do not agree with.
	And if you'll permit me a follow-up, do you see this as sexual harassment by tweet?
	I see it as a sexist smear.
	I mean, that's what it is.
	Okay, so again, this is one of the ways that Democrats are going to overplay their own hand.
	I talked about Democrats losing.
	They may not lose congressional elections, but Kirsten Gillibrand is not going to win against Donald Trump on the basis that this is a sexist smear, because it was not a sexist smear.
	I think that the White House was exactly right when Sarah Huckabee Sanders got mocked yesterday for saying this.
	I think she was 100% correct.
	She was asked by the press about the so-called sexist smear against Kirsten Gillibrand.
	And here's what she had to say.
	She said, get your minds out of the gutter.
	Gillibrand owed an apology for the misunderstanding of the president's tweet this morning, because many, including the senator, think that it's about sexual innuendos.
	I think only if your mind is in the gutter would you have read it that way.
	And so, no.
	Hunter?
	No, it's not.
	He's obviously talking about political partisan games that people often play and the broken system that he's talked about repeatedly.
	This isn't new.
	This isn't a new sentiment.
	This isn't new terminology.
	He's used it several times before.
	As I said a few minutes ago, he's used it several times before, referencing men of both parties, in fact.
	Okay, so she is exactly correct.
	The media went nuts over nothing, and this is why Trump continues to befuddle his opponents.
	He can befuddle his opponents, but it doesn't drip down to the lower levels, and this is one of the problems.
	Only Trump can be Trump.
	Only Trump is capable of being Trump.
	If Trump wants to govern, he's going to need more than Trump in order to do that.
	There's more than one branch of the federal government.
	Okay, so now, if you want to watch the rest of the show, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
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	Okay, so meanwhile, the Republicans are trying to rush this tax bill through.
	The details on the tax bill are not particularly clear at this point.
	They say that they have a deal, so I guess this thing is going to get passed.
	According to the New York Times, the deal is already on the table.
	The Republicans are going to be making the corporate tax rate 21%, I guess, is the final deal here.
	This is the New York Times reporting.
	They say that the details on the deal were not immediately available on Tuesday.
	The Republicans said they were close to agreement on a package that included a cut in the corporate tax rate to 21% from a high of 35% and reducing the top income tax rate for individuals to 37% from 39.6%.
	All of this would be good.
	It's not clear if Republican senators would get behind the deal.
	One of the big problems with not having Luther Strange in the Senate is that Republicans are going to be down to 51 votes.
	That means that basically John McCain and one friend can tank any tax deal that is done here.
	Or Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.
	Or Susan Collins and John McCain.
	52 votes, a lot better than 51 votes.
	But that's why you shouldn't run, piece of garbage candidates.
	So they're saying that both Susan Collins of Maine and Marco Rubio of Florida are raising concerns.
	Collins says she's not in favor of the lower individual tax rate, and Rubio wants a more generous child tax credit.
	I'm sort of split on the child tax credit myself, I gotta be honest with you.
	Number one, I think that the idea that it incentivizes people to have kids is just not true.
	I don't think anybody sits around and they go, you know what?
	I really need a child tax credit.
	I'm gonna have this baby now.
	It may alleviate some financial need for people with kids, which I guess is good, but I don't think the government should be picking and choosing which behaviors to push with tax policy.
	I think there should be basically a flat tax rate without the government trying to make these sorts of considerations.
	The Senate bill narrowly passed 51-49 with Bob Corker voting against the legislation.
	The agreement was finalized Wednesday morning, hours before the first and only scheduled public meeting of the Congressional Conference Committee formed to work out the differences between the House and Senate-passed versions of the bill.
	So, we will see what the final bill looks like.
	It is a bill that moves the ball in the right direction.
	I believe that they are set to keep the removal of the individual mandate in Obamacare, which is good policy because nobody should be forced to buy health insurance.
	It will increase the price of health insurance for sick people in the individual market across the country.
	That's why the Republicans are seeking to backfill that by basically funding all of those health insurance programs directly, which may or may not be good policy.
	Bottom line is it will be a major victory for President Trump.
	President Trump will deserve kudos for it.
	Republicans will deserve kudos for it.
	They need to get another couple of victories under their belt if they really want to succeed in 2018 and not get blown out.
	Okay, time for some things I like, things I hate, and then a quick Bible talk.
	First, I've been doing Beethoven all week.
	So people have heard this music, but they don't know what it is from.
	It is from the Pathetique Sonata, the piano sonata by Beethoven.
	This is the second movement of the Pathetique Sonata by Beethoven.
	His piano sonatas are all great.
	I actually prefer the Appassionata to the Pathétique, but if we are doing sort of well-known Beethoven that you don't know what it's from, this is what it is from.
	PIANO PLAYS
	PIANO PLAYS It's just amazing music.
	One of the things about Beethoven that's really fascinating is that he's underrated as a melodic composer because his development sections are so good.
	In classical music, very often classical music is structured like you play a melody and then there's a development section and then there's a recapitulation.
	Meaning that you go back to the melody at the end.
	His development sections are always very complex and very interesting, and very tight, usually, even though he writes much longer music than a lot of other classical composers.
	If you look at a typical Beethoven symphony beyond the third, the Eroica, which really revolutionized symphonies, the first movement of the Eroica is longer than entire Mozart symphonies.
	But his melodic gift is still very much in evidence.
	I won't say that Beethoven's melodies are as memorable as Mozart's, as a general rule.
	Mozart is gifted with melody.
	Tchaikovsky, uniquely gifted with melody.
	But Beethoven's melodies are moving, and there's a certain subtlety to them that doesn't necessarily exist in Mozart or Tchaikovsky.
	They're less showy, but they're a little bit more spiritual.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So now it is important, I guess, to the left that even Barbie dolls have a political agenda.
	So first we heard for years that Barbie dolls made little girls feel inferior about their bodies.
	Again, I have not met these little girls.
	My sisters like playing with Barbies, particularly my second sister.
	I have three.
	She was a big Barbie doll acolyte.
	She had entire boxes of Barbie dolls.
	Never at any point did she say, well, I wish I looked like Barbie.
	I don't know the idea that little girls were sitting around getting anorexic because they saw Barbie doll.
	I always thought that kind of stuff was stupid.
	I really don't think that's the case.
	I think that if you're going to look to the reasons for people having body dysmorphia and body image issues, it has very little to do with Barbie and a lot more to do with popular advertising and or parental failures.
	Now they've decided to turn Barbie into a social justice warrior.
	So, writer Elizabeth Segrin wrote an article for Fast Company in which she said, Barbie is a doll.
	It's an inanimate object.
	Barbie didn't do anything.
	The people who work at Mattel did something.
	She was pictured in a series of photos with another doll, Amy, wearing t-shirts emblazoned with Love Wins, the slogan of the marriage equality movement.
	Barbie is a doll.
	It's an inanimate object.
	Barbie didn't do anything.
	The people who work at Mattel did something.
	And the people who work at Mattel did that because they felt like catering to a particular political audience.
	Politicizing children's toys is really unpleasant, people.
	It's unpleasant.
	Okay, making my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter think about lesbianism at three-and-a-half seems to me a bad move.
	Maybe this is heteronormative.
	I don't care.
	You know why?
	Because I think that it is better for young girls to be thinking along the lines of eventual marriage to men than it is for them to think that they can marry anyone.
	I think it is better for society.
	I think it is better for civilization.
	Now, they may turn out to be lesbians, right?
	A little girl may turn out to be a lesbian.
	That's okay.
	I don't really have a problem with that.
	What I do have a problem with is the idea that society is going to suggest that all sexual orientations have equal impact on children, or that all children should be taught about a variety of sexual orientations before they even have sexual feelings or are confused about sexual feelings.
	Confusing children is a form of sin in my mind, and adults are fond of doing it, and now they're using children's toys to do it.
	In one pair, in one of these pictures, the pair is sitting cozily in Barbie's walk-in closet, stroking a dog and staring into each other's eyes.
	In another, they're eating avocado toast at their favorite Silver Lake Cafe.
	So, good news, Barbie's now a lesbian, which I'm sure makes more men than women happy, actually.
	But that's not enough.
	In September, a Barbie-style Instagram account featured Barbie wearing a People Are People t-shirt designed by Christian Serrano to protest President Trump's immigration ban.
	So now Barbie's an immigration activist.
	Which, again, it's an inanimate object.
	Why should my three-and-a-half-year-old be taught about immigration policy?
	This is just stupid.
	Protecting children and the innocence of children means protecting them from having to think about issues where they've not been informed about any of the background and they have no capacity to make decent decisions on these things.
	Why we don't allow five-year-olds to vote?
	Let's put it this way.
	If the target audience for your product is not capable of making a rational decision about a topic, don't present them the information on the topic.
	Don't present them the illusion that they're capable of making a rational decision about this.
	You're setting a bias in the background.
	I just think that's wrong.
	Now for a quick Bible study.
	So in the aftermath of Alabama, a lot of Republicans are understandably very upset.
	I'm upset too.
	There are some people who are chortling this morning on the conservative side of the aisle.
	I am certainly not one of them.
	I am very deeply unhappy that the senator from Alabama is now a Democrat.
	I think that's terrible for the country.
	Terrible in very different ways.
	Roy Moore had an elected senator from Alabama.
	Sometimes the choice between hepatitis and cancer means that everyone is basically going to be disease-ridden.
	But I think that we should take some solace in the Bible.
	There's a lot of talk about Bible surrounding this election.
	And it seems like there's very little reference to the actual text of the Bible.
	So this is from Isaiah 30.
	And I think this should be of some comfort.
	This is a situation which I've talked about a couple times on the program, in which Isaiah was urging the king of Israel, Hezekiah, not to side with the Egyptians against the Assyrians, to basically allow events to take their course.
	And here's what Isaiah said, he said, Because you have rejected this message, relied on oppression, depended on deceit, this sin will become for you like a high wall, cracked and bulging, that collapses suddenly in an instant.
	It will break in pieces like pottery, shattered so mercilessly that among its pieces not a fragment will be found for taking coals from a hearth or scooping water out of a cistern.
	This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says, In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.
	You said no, we will flee on horses.
	Therefore, you will flee.
	You said we will ride off on swift horses.
	Therefore, your pursuers will be swift.
	A thousand will flee at the threat of one.
	At the threat of five, you will all flee away till you are left like a flagstaff on a mountaintop, like a banner on a hill.
	Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you.
	Therefore, He will rise up to show you compassion.
	For the Lord is a God of justice.
	Blessed are all who wait for Him.
	This doesn't mean that God's going to make all your decisions for you.
	What it does mean is that when you hold true to godly values, and what I mean by this is not lying to yourself, not pretending away moral conflicts.
	When you hold true to godly values, no matter what decision you make, when you have that foremost in your mind, You're not abandoning God.
	You are abandoning God when you suggest that you're going to put your faith in men, that you're going to put your faith in bad men, that you think that the only thing that you can do now is a choice between a bad man and another bad man, as opposed to waiting it out.
	I just don't think that's the case.
	We're only going to have a better day in this country when we all realize that there are better people on the horizon so long as we can wait for them.
	And more than that, more importantly than that, that if we abide by the values that God instills in us, if we abide by biblical values in terms of how we treat our fellow man and how we vote for our fellow man, then perhaps God will bring about a better day when the candidates that we vote for are actually worthy of our votes.
	OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with more fallout, I'm sure.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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